1. Field of the Disclosure
The invention relates to detection of “SMS Grey Routes” type of fraud, SMS routes that are legal for one country or the party on one end, but illegal on the alternative end.
2. Description of the Related Art
Our prior published US patent specification number US2008/092225 describes an approach to preventing entry of spam messages into a network. It is based on correlating an incoming SRI-for-SM request with the subsequent incoming MT-FSM message delivery attempt.
US2010/0105355 (Nooren) describes a method and system for detection of an unauthorized service message in a network. This approach is based on USSD (unstructured supplementary service data) service.
US2008/0026778 (Cai et al) describes message spoofing detection via validation of an originating switch (e.g. MSC). This is related to the SMS-SC incoming Mobile Originating (MO) type of SMS traffic, while “SMS grey routes” relate to incoming foreign Mobile Terminated (MT) type of SMS traffic.
There is an increasing problem with the extent of messages received into networks which are fraudulent because of faking of originating subscribers or networks.
SMS-based marketing is becoming increasingly utilized and powerful in everyday society. Studies show that consumers are much more likely to read and respond to text messages than traditional electronic channels, such as e-mail. As with any other market, mobile marketing landscape is also subjected to a certain level of legality. Crossing its boundaries would take place in the area of low-cost, bulk SMS delivery.
A lot of SMS service providers (or SMS “aggregators”, but not operators) are currently offering wholesale SMS services at a reduced price to their customers. Although in itself this is not necessarily an illegal activity (when based on direct connectivity to the operator's network), it has been observed that conveying of short messages in many cases relies on indirect routes (either through interconnect hubs or other operator interconnect routes). Such routes can be perfectly legal on one end (originating or terminating), but they can be illegal on the other end respectively. These are so-called “Grey Routes”. An example is a marketing campaign realized through networks of mobile operator A targeting the subscriber base of operator B. Depending on interconnect agreements between operator A and operator B, these routes can be either legal or illegal. The lawfulness of conveying the traffic through a particular route might be based only on human-to-human traffic, while messages delivered in the scope of advertisement campaigns are prohibited.
Another related example of “grey routes” is based on detecting SMS traffic exchange via SS7 links, while the interconnect agreements between the two operators are set to be via SMPP interconnect links only.
In many cases, to avoid the detection of agreement violation, the source of the “illegal” messages appears to be perfectly legal as it fakes either a mobile originating MSISDN or the originating mobile network.
Exploitation of the grey routes is generally utilized to lower the cost of inter-network SMS termination of any nature (peer to peer, application to peer and peer to application). The invention addresses this problem.